SOME EARLY CHINESE WOMEN IN GUYANA
( Feature Address given by Marlene Kwok Crawford at the Opening of “An Enduring Female Legacy” Celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the Arrival of Chinese Women in Guyana” 18th-22nd August, 2010 at The Chinese Association of Guyana).
After the slaves in Guyana were fully emancipated on 1st August, 1838, many of them left the sugar plantations and new labourers were brought in mainly from Madeira and India as indentured servants. However, it was decided to bring some indentured servants from China also in spite of the fact that it was more costly to do so and the first Chinese arrived on the Glentanner from Amoy on 12thJanuary, 1853.
No Chinese women came on the first few ships from China and it was not until seven years later that the first 61 women arrived on the Whirlwind on 11thMarch, 1860. The Dora arrived the next month on 4thApril, 1860 with 138 females and the largest amount of females (155) ever to arrive in Guyana came on the Zouave on 29thFebruary, 1864.
It was always difficult to obtain Chinese female immigrants to come to Guyana and several strategies were adopted to get them to do so. Some were abducted from the streets of the port towns, while young widows with children were encouraged to come and get married again, usually to much older menwho could more easilyafford to pay the price for a bride. Destitute women were also brought from the rural areas, and, with their consent, were sold as concubines, household servants, and labourers. Some of the male emigrants had used the $20 offered for females, to purchase wives for themselves from among these women but this practice was soon stopped by the Chinese authorities during the 1864-1865 recruiting season and so all the women who sailed on subsequent voyages were bona fide wives or mothers.
By the time that the Dartmouth, the last immigrant ship which came as a private venture of theWest India Committee, landed in Georgetown in 1879, only 2, 075 females out of a total of13,541 Chinese immigrants had come to Guyana and because of this disproportionate amount of women to men, the women in Guyana became extremely valuable and a daughter was such an asset that she could be used as collateral to obtain a loan for a family to establish itself in business.
In Guyana, too, Chinese women had a more dominant position in the family when their elderly husbands died while they were still quite young with several young children to look after. It is thus the women who left a markon their families and on the history of Guyana and tonight I would like to focus a little more on four of these women.
MARY FUNG-A-FAT is the ancestress of the Fung-A-Fat family and is the Liberator of Chinese women in Guyana. She was the daughter of Mr. Wong who had come to Guyana as a child and her mother was a Madrassi woman whom he had married. Mary grew up to be a beautiful girl and she was given by her father to the Chinese money-lender Lee-A-Tak as collateral for his loan. When Mary was fifteen, she was purchased by Mr. Man Son Hing of Stabroek who wanted a beautiful wife for his son .but unfortunately the son died of typhoid fever a few weeks before the wedding and Mary was now regarded as Bad Luck and the Living Devil and she now became the hated, unwanted, unpaid servant in the house.
Then, one day, Mr. Charles Fung-A-Fat visited the house. He was a young, rich, handsome, newly arrived Chinese man who saw Mary and fell in love with her. He eventually stole her out of the house and married her. Such behavior as running away to marry a young man of her own choice was unheard ofat that time and caused a furore among the Chinese in Guyana.
The young couple went to live at Non Pariel on the East Coast Demerara where they planted and milled rice. They had 10 girls and 3 boys. The girls went to school at the Ursuline Convent in Church Streetand when it was time for them to marry, Mary held balls and dinner parties where they were able to meet suitable men and depending on whom they liked matches would be arranged accordingly. This freedom of choice which Mary gave her daughters was also something unheard of at that time. She had the revolutionary belief in the right of women to decide for themselves what to do with their lives and so when her daughter Irene refused to marry any of her suitors, Mary not only accepted her decision but also made sure that Irene would be independent of the family by leaving her a legacy of $10,000 which would enable her to live comfortably the rest of her life.
Mary thus opened the door of freedom from parental tyranny for Chinese girls and many later seized the opportunity to marry partners of their own choice, even of other races. Some families broke ties with them and fell back on the old Chinese rule that “girls do not belong to the family into which they are born, but rather to the family into which they marry”.
Chinese girls never again lived “enclosed” lives,always being kept in the background and they freely joined clubs, played games, joined the work force, etc. They were able to support themselves without being dependent solely on their fathers’ generosity.
ALICE FUNG-A-LINGwas born in 1887, the eldest of four children. Her parents were Job Fung-A-Ling and his wife Rosa Chin-A-Kou. Job had come as a grown man from China and had become the owner of a small sugar estate on WakenaamIsland, Essequibo and he was also a merchant based in Georgetown. However, by the time his youngest son Isaac Moses was born in 1898, Job’s fortunes took a turn for the worse when sugar prices fell and he was forced to sell off his estate. In October 1898 Job died, leaving Rosa to take care of the young family. Since Alice was a bright student, Rosa decided to send her to further her studies abroad and sent her to Skerry’s College and the School of Medicine for Women in Edinburgh, Scotland. However in 1916, after successfully completing her 2nd year in medicine there, funds were no longer available for her to completehermedical degree. Alice therefore returned home and joined the staff of the PublicHospital, Georgetown. She passed all of her nursing exams by 1919 and eventually was appointed Assistant Matron.
In1921 she was awarded the Gold Medal for Special Merit and was also appointedin that same year, Matron of Best Hospital, the sanitarium for tuberculosis patients at Vreed-en-Hoop, West Coast Demerara She served there for many years until her retirement. Matron Fung-A-Ling alsotrained at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, London for the London CMB whichshe passed in 1927.
MARTHA FUNG- KEE-FUNGnée Kwok is the ancestress of the Fung-Kee--Fung family and she was the eldest of four children born to Abraham Kwok, a shopkeeper and his wife Victoria Phang Shee. Her youngest brother was my paternal grandfather James Kwok.
She was born on 23rdJanuary 1874 at WindsorForest and was educated at St, Phillip’s AnglicanSchool, Georgetown. She married Joseph Fung-Kee-Fung, also of WindsorForest, who was 16 years older and they had five sons and five daughters before Joseph died on 21st July, 1914.
Martha’s hobby was horseracing but she wassuch a very successful businesswoman by the time of her death aged 76 years on 3rd October, 1940and was so highly respected by the entire community of West Coast Demerara, that Martha Street in WindsorForest was named after her. She was a landed proprietor who owned many businesses – grocery, cake-shop, retail spirit shop, dry goods store and rice mill. Shealso bought the two sugar estates Waller’s Delight and Ruimzight after the sugar factory was closed at WindsorForest and rented them to tenants for planting rice.
VICTORIA LAM was the fourth of twelve children born on 22nd January, 1890 to Isaac Luck and his wife Annie Woong-Foong and whose seventh child is the well known J.C Luck, founder and principal of CentralHigh School. Victoria was born at the Hopetown Chinese Settlement which had been established in 1865 on the left bank of the Kamuni Creek which is a tributary on the left bank of the DemeraraRiver, 22 miles up, near to Timehri.
Victoria was married to Edwin Lam who was born on 14th January, 1886 and died on 1stJuly, 1956 and they had four sons and three daughters. She was the owner of the successful Wholesale Provision Store known as “V.LAM” at Lot 9A Water Street, Georgetown.
These are just four of the early Chinese women who not only were themselves successful in their own lives but who also helped in changing the general perception that women’s place was in the home, unnoticed, in the background. They showed the way to success in every field which their own descendants and others were quick to follow.
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